21 comentários:

Yeah! Didn't I tell you I took a sabbatical-like year to work on neuroscience models? I use data from comparative neuroanatomy (i.e., brains from different species) to try to work out models for brain connectivity and the like. I'm still a cosmologist (just sent a paper to publication), but now with a strong interest in the application of math and physics modelling to biology.

I am very interested in the research about neuro-plasticity. I have even ordered three books recently about this. Though I am interested in this stuff more from the practical and personal point of view.

Isn't it lovely when your nationality comes between inverted commas? ;^) Reading this sort of ramblings make me feel sane, even if just by comparison.

Neuroplasticity is an astounding phenomenon. My research touches it only peripherally (certain kinds of network are more 'plastic' and resistant to damage than others), but it is a fascinating subject. But why is the interest personal? Too much booze in Telavivian nights? ;-)

I don't mind the commas. I am not a proud person. Jews have spent too much time in Europe and elsewhere outside the Middle East. We've lost it. I can only envy Arabs ability to go nuts at the slightest possibility that they may be insulted or something.

But I was equally impressed by the style. These people do have something to do with poetry. You can't deny it. I am reading occasionally Jewish sites too including extremist ones and there's very little to read actually. It's ugly and very technical. Something like lets connect 100 howitzers to the alarm system around Gaza so that every time a Kassam is in the air 100 shells hit random locations across Gaza. Something like this. Fucking Jews have always been too mercantile. They don't have a bit of a notion about poetry. it's this combination of madness and poetry that gets me when I read many Arab blogs.

As to neuroplasticity as a personal interest, all my life I was beset with attention problems and dyslexia. So I am interested in all stuff that touches on this in a vain hope to develop a system of my own that will allow people to rid themselves of this shit by using their mental power and will. Of course it may be too late for me and not even possible at all, but nevertheless I am still after it.

This is by the way an example of the stuff I am interested in. Of course this one may be a bit popular science and usually I prefer books but the idea is the same. I also has a sort of inclination towards mild mysticism, something like Jung's synchronicity. Lets say that though I can argue and my logic is usually good, I would not define myself as a particularly rational person

I think yoga is no crackpottery. First of all, it manifestly works. Second, achieving yoga results by other means (i.e., general exercising) is hard to impossible. Now, of course, the explanations offered by the yoga traditions as to why it works are very mystical and vague, but even those explanations probably hold a lot of (scientifically verifiable) insights, once we manage to map the mystical terminology in terms of human physiology and brain processes. And if your aim is to learn and practice yoga, these mystical explanations are probably more usefull than a lot of talk about action potentials and neuronal cascades. They can be regarded as what we call 'effective theories' (i.e., they deal with entities (ki, chacras, or whatever) which are abstractions of the physical underlying entities (muscles, neurons amd whatnot); but in practice the complicated interactions between the latter are identical to the simpler interactions between the former given by the 'effective theory'

In any case, I usually like people who do serious yoga, and yoga seems to makes them better persons somehow

It is a bit like the Shaolin monks. You may or may not believe their Buddhist kungfu lore, but they'll kick your ass either way.

Lets say I leave a huge space in my thinking to the unknown. I am not trying to create some comprehensive worldview because I assume that our knowledge of the world and human nature is absolutely inadequate for this. Given that it's the unknown unknown there is very little that one can actually say about this. My assumption that ethic stuff is somewhat more fundamental than evolutionary psychology or rational egoism can explain. But then it's just an intuition. I can't prove it in any way.

By the way I don't know if you are interested in economics and such stuff. I have a post about the crisis. If you have something to say on this issue, I would be interested to hear.